You may ask, “Why is this important?”. The commitment they are making to you as your leader to being transparent and accountable is once piece, but it’s also the new found ability they have to work with you directly as citizens! These leaders now can ask you directly any question they want via your cell phone or Facebook. They can publish news directly to you about what is going on in your state and your district. They can even see how you feel on all of the bills in real-time.

I believe this is a great leap forward in democracy and these political leaders are setting the pace and the example as thought leaders in politics and technology:

1. Kirsten Gillibrand, Democratic Senator New York
2. Kendrick Meek, Democratic Congressman, candidate for U.S. Senate, Florida
3. Martin Elsass, Libertarian candidate for U.S. House of Representatives, Ohio’s Congressional District 6
4. Mike Frisbee, Democratic candidate for U.S. House of Representatives, Georgia’s Congressional District 13
5. Joe Krysztoforski, Republican candidate for U.S. House of Representatives, Maryland’s Congressional District 6
6. Terrence Wall, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, Wisconsin
7. Tony Gentile, Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate, Louisiana
8. Bill Scheurer, Green candidate for U.S. House of Representatives, Illinois’ Congressional District 8
9. Chris Leopold, Republican candidate for U.S. House of Representatives, Louisiana’s Congressional District 3
10. Roger K. Davis, Green candidate for U.S. House of Representatives, Illinois’ Congressional District 17
11. Jerry McKinley, Libertarian candidate for U.S. House of Representatives, Maryland’s Congressional District 3

In the coming weeks you will find on each candidate’s website the official Visible Vote badges.  This badge lets the people know that the candidate’s campaign is active on Visible Vote and that the candidate is committed to being transparent and accountable to their constituents.

We are talking to campaigns across the country and getting some amazing interest in feedback. Stay tuned to see if your representative joins up!

CHICAGO, May 7 /PRNewswire/ — Today Visible Vote announced that it has surpassed 100,000 users in the United States and 1.3 million votes sent by citizens to Congress. Visible Vote is a free, n on-partisan application available on Smartphones, Desktops, and Facebook that gives citizens the ability to advise their congressional leaders how to vote for them on individual bills with a click of a button.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20100507/CG01088LOGO)

“We are growing at an amazing rate and are trending higher every day,” said Paul Everton, CEO of Visible Vote. “According to an internal poll 96% of our mobile users will bring Visible Vote into the voting booth with them to decide on who to elect this year.”

Visible Vote’s core feature allows people with a PC, iPhone, BlackBerry, Android phone or Facebook account to vote on any legislation being considered by Congress. After Congress votes it then instantly compares their views to those of their elected officials and friends. Other features include the ability to uncover the names of your legislators, send your legislators a fax at the push of a button and view state-by-state data on legislator performance. People can begin making their voices heard for free through Visible Vote or view its real-time data by visiting http://www.visiblevote.us.

Visible Vote

Visible Vote is a new, non-partisan approach to creating greater transparency for our representative form of government.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/visible-vote-surpasses-100000-users-in-the-united-states-96-of-users-will-use-visible-vote-to-decide-who-to-elect-93058504.html

As our numbers grow so has interest from legislators and challengers running for office this year. We receive constant inquiries not only from the people that represent you today but also the ones who want to represent you in the future. We love the fact that we are amplifying your voices and are making it so that civic engagement isn’t a full time job for citizens anymore.

Visible Vote has some more exciting news coming too! We look forward to sharing it with you soon so please stay tuned!

Whenever most people think about government and how they can influence it, most of them probably think that their pockets aren’t deep enough.  How can they be?  Multibillion dollar companies are the ones at the steps of congress, lobbying your local Congressmen and state Senators on a daily basis.  I mean they wine and dine them, shower them with unicorns and gold-plated diapers, take them on exotic trips, what don’t they do (maybe not the unicorns)?  How is the average citizen supposed to compete with that?  The answer may seem like we can’t, but maybe we can.

The strength that we the people have in this country is our numbers.  Isn’t that the strength of any democracy? While the majority of us may not have the financial muscle to impress anyone individually, together we can put any Forbes 500 company to shame!

At Visible Vote we’re trying to do something about this dilemma and opportunity, so we are expanding our donation feature from donating to any regular organization to now having the ability to instantaneously donate money to any representative in Congress, the Senate, or to their competition.

In the current system supporting a representative you feel is strong is not easy.  To do it you have to struggle through a bloated and confusing system even to give a few dollars, an attempt that will likely end in vain. Now imagine if a person had a way to do it in 4 minutes? With a few button clicks? From Facebook? From their cellphone? Now what if ten people did it? Or ten thousand? Or a million?  Now we’re getting influential.

At that point we don’t think it’s wasting hard earned money.  We believe it’s a way to increase the volume of the American people’s voice.  Shouting over those big companies and maybe giving that poorly funded but better candidate a fighting chance. Needless to say we’re excited about the feature and feel it is one more tool in Visible Vote’s utility belt for letting the American people get a better grip on their future.

In our first Visible Pulse update, many of you are telling us that Senate Republicans are on your side more often than Senate Democrats, with some notable exceptions. You’re also showing that three seats up for grabs in 2010 could well flip from D’s to R’s – those held by Senators Evan Bayh (D-IN), Harry Reid (D-NV), and Byron Dorgan (D-ND).

Here are the Senators voting most often with their Visible Vote constituents:

1. George LeMieux (R-FL)
2. Jim Demint (R-SC)
3. Jon Kyl (R-AZ)
4. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)
5. Jim Bunning (R-KY)
6. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
7. Richard Burr (R-NC)
8. Richard Shelby (R-AL)
9. Charles Schumer (D-NY)
10. Richard Durbin (D-IL)

Here are the Senators voting least often with their Visible Vote constituents:

1. Al Franken (D-MN)
2. Jim Webb (D-VA)
3. Kay Hagan (D-NC)
4. Mark Warner (D-VA)
5. Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
6. Claire McCaskill (D-MO)
7. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
8. Evan Bayh (D-IN)
9. Bill Nelson (D-FL)
10. Sherrod Brown (D-OH)
11. Robert Casey (D-PA)

You’ve also made it clear five issues are top on your list — economic stimulus programs, stem cell research, unemployment benefits, and funding to fight AIDS, Malaria, and TB around the world.

Let us know what you think! Don’t agree with today’s Visible Pulse, talk to Visible Vote and let us know how you feel.

Last week we introduced our latest version that gives our users access to all the bills in Congress.  Not a few, not just the popular ones and not just the controversial ones – all of them, every last bill that gets a Yay or Nay in front of Congress.  Now the power of deciding what bills are the most important is in each individual’s hands. Once 2% of the Visible Vote user base adds a bill it becomes visible for everyone to see, making it possible for those little known, but still important issues, to rise to the surface based on the American citizen’s opinion.

We couldn’t stop there though, we wanted more, so we added one click calling of your legislator’s offices, global comments on bills and representatives so a dialogue is constantly open, and some really stellar graphical breakdowns of the statistics that the American people are generating via the Visible Vote website.  We encourage everyone to dive into the site and check out the statistics maps, you may be surprised by some of the results.  In addition to these changes all of the major bills for the last year have been made available in an easy to digest way.

Every day we receive feedback from our users and we are working hard to respond to everyone’s criticisms, suggestions and concerns (we also appreciate the occasional high five).  The feedback has really been amazing and is definitely going to shape the program in the future so that citizens have a louder voice.  Thank you for helping, because none of this would be possible without every single one of you!

In the coming months ahead we are going to blog about a variety of different aspects of Visible Vote. We are going to talk about how we are building the company, the progress we are making in creating a more transparent and accountable government, and most importantly the voice we are hoping to create for every US citizen.

The idea of Visible Vote came to me a few weeks after Sept 19th, 2008 while speaking with my brother about the $700 billion dollar bailout and finding out first hand how difficult (if not impossible) it was to get involved in the political process AND be effective. After a couple months of design ideas I began trying to find friends to help me.

A family friend, Steven Trac, had just graduated with his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Miami. Steve struggled to find work in a terrible economy when employers were shedding thousands of jobs. I told Steve my idea and he agreed to help me create Visible Vote. I also called my brother Matthew Everton to help with the graphics, he of course had to agree. We finally found our footing and started programming on January 20th, 2009.

Steve and I programmed every night and weekend for 3 months and created the first version of Visible Vote that ran on Facebook! At first we thought Visible Vote was a great tool for keeping track of our representatives, but we quickly realized it could be used proactively as a tool to advise Congress on what people wanted before Congress voted!

We have made huge leaps in the technology in the past year! We have introduced Visible Vote on the iPhone, Blackberry, Google Android and Windows. We have created a dynamic website which contains some wonderful interactive components. We have gone to great lengths to make sure out data is accurate. And so much more…

We have now built quite an amazing group of people around Visible Vote, and I look forward to telling you about them and the future of our company. Our ultimate hope is to make Visible Vote the most empowering tool the voter has ever seen and we have tons of great ideas for the coming year!